If they lose the research edge, basically the only structural advantages America has is (1) public elections, (2) likely more advanced legal theory and (3) not being an ethnostate. If they don't succeed in bringing those advantages into play then the US military is "soon" going to confined to the American continent.
The US is going to have legal problems with this Chinese activity and is going to try and do something about it, whether that is intellectually honest or not.
There is no scenario where that outcome happens. It's so absurd as to barely warrant a retort. Your premise requires that China enslave the entire planet, literally. China has to physically occupy - whether directly in-border or near-shore - and dictate all choices of every ally of the US, including all NATO members, as well as all of Asia.
You missed a lot of other advantages the US has over China.
4) A demographic advantage, which is a separate advantage from just not being an ethnostate. China's demographics are rapidly collapsing. There has never been a rising superpower that maintains its upward trajectory with a failing demographics, that will hold true as it pertains to China as well. Cheap, high volume labor is their largest single advantage, and they're losing those workers at an accelerating rate.
5) The US has fewer people and a system already transitioned to a high income low labor volume approach, which is a massive advantage in the era of automation and artificial intelligence. China has to go through that transition yet and it's going to be brutal for them. China has a population the size of the US living on $3 per day; one of the poorest large segments of population on the planet. Those people will never climb the prosperity ladder because it's impossible, and that dire context is only going to get worse as China's formerly easy growth slows perpetually going forward. China has already gotten old before they got rich at the median, it's too late.
6) An immigration advantage, which is slightly different from (although it relates to) the ethnostate reference. China will never convince the Elon Musks of the world to move to China.
7) Freedom of expression and speech, which is a massive cultural benefit globally (including when it comes to propaganda). It's why the US is the only country in world history to acquire a position of global cultural hegemony, spanning music, TV, movies and cultural projection broadly. No other nation has come even remotely close. As is, China can never possess this advantage.
8) China's system requires that they install a global dictatorship, or it has to collapse back in on itself. Their system is too fragile, too easily broken. You can see that in their emotionalism and fear about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, any tiny protest or movement, any challenge to the party dictatorship, and how you can't discuss any of their numerous atrocities like Mao's famines or Tiananmen (ie you can never actually discuss their history). They have to expand their system of censorship globally (which is what they're trying to do right now, with Wolf Warrior diplomacy, trying to browbeat and threaten everyone into submission). In the US, you can freely discuss all of the mistakes the US has made, and everyone constantly does; we're jabbed globally 24/7 and we absorb that as part of being a superpower; that openness to criticism generates real long-term stability (not fake perceived stability, a managed image that isn't real).
9) English as the globally dominant language. The world will never adopt Mandarin widely.
10) The US is a liberal, democratic nation with a huge number of powerful global allies that are also part of the liberal order (from France to South Korea). China has no allies, only frenemies like Russia and North Korea. All the countries near China are terrified of them and will naturally ally with the US accordingly, including Vietnam. Countries like Japan and South Korea will never be allies with China, they're permanent rivals.
11) Open societies are always vastly superior to insular, closed-off societies. That includes when it comes to attracting immigration, getting the maximum out of their own people, or producing cultural output to project into the world. In the US, a Muslim genius from Xinjiang is free to become the next Jensen Huang; in China, they're in a re-education camp being tortured and denied all human rights. In the US, you can freely mock our leaders if they do stupid things (as an example) - on TV, in movies, and so on, a critical cultural element that China entirely lacks and it makes their system weak, fragile (see: Alec Baldwin v Trump, or Will Ferrell v Bush; those people would be in prison for doing that in China; the US has a long, glorious history of taking its elites to the mat, going back before Mark Twain). Being able to freely make fun of the elites, is a critical necessity to a stable system over time; in China, joke apps are illegal.
12) China has an aggressive caste system that de facto wholly revokes all rights of minority groups such as gay persons (and also including many other groups). The US welcomes and celebrates openly the vast success of a Tim Cook or David Geffen or Ellen Degeneres or Peter Thiel, China doesn't; instead, China violently opppresses all gay people (going so far as to torture them, literally, in an attempt to convert them from being gay).
13) The US has the global reserve currency and it shows no signs of being under threat of being replaced. The Yuan has basically a zero global share of the currency market outside of their borders. The reason for that is because nobody trusts China. That isn't going to change anytime soon.
14) The people of the US have the ability to openly interact with the rest of the world, which is an extraordinary advantage in all regards. The people of China have no ability to freely interact with the rest of the world's citizens, a detriment in so many ways it would take me hours here to discuss it all.
15) Dictatorships always get worse with time, as the dictators seek to retain power against all the forces that inevitably naturally want to rebel against that. Long-serving dictators essentially never liberalize a society. Xi will further crush the people of China under his lust for power, as all dictatorships do as the years go on (and he has already done plenty of that, so it'll get that much worse yet). China's political trajectory is terrifying for the people of China, given the near total revocation of all practiced human rights we've seen there in just the past decade.
16) Command economies don't function well over time. China's fast growth had been quasi masking their vast inefficiencies and economic flaws. You can see those mistakes and problems showing up in their extreme, and rapidly growing debt levels (specifically in their economy), as they require enormous constant additional debt to fake growth; in the span of just ~20 years they became the most indebted nation in history. The market economy system always proves vastly superior, you can see this all over the globe. The most successful economies are market based economies, including: the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel and so on. All the highest GDP per capita nations are market based economies (with the sole couple exceptions being small energy states like Qatar), not command economies like China. China's one great trick was the combination of mercantilism and vast cheap labor. That trick has been exhausted, going forward their situation will get far more difficult as the easy slack in their economy is gone.
There are a lot more I can list.
- the RMB is indeed in use in a number of Asian countries as an informal second currency.
- USD as global reserve currency is strong but on a downward trend. In some parts of the world the Euro has become more important and the largest holder of USD is China. If they truly wanted to harm the US they could dump these in big tranches - without this unique advantage a lot of US politics (in particular the eternal debt growth) simply don't work any longer.
- from a European perspective I have to say it does not look like the US is very democratic. A two-party state effectively run by the wealthy for their own profit, with a hundred million in an economically precarious condition with not even real access to healthcare.
I do think the last years have shown that the US too is extremely fragile, just as you diagnose for the PRC.
China successfully infiltrates the US military research network and develops/steals enough technology to close the arms tech gap. Then China, aka 'the factory of the world', starts producing military gear and using it to stabilise regimes in Middle East and Africa. The US, worn down under infighting and with very high debts, cannot sustain its involvement on the Asian and African continents and is forced to withdraw. The Europeans, sensing a sea change in the world order, remilitarise and ask the US to leave.
There you go, now you know a scenario that could play out over ~20-30 years. Maintaining a worldwide network of military bases is expensive, China doesn't have to 'enslave' the planet to force the US to mind their own business. It just has to level the playing field a little and the US won't be able to afford the effort.
Oh, you mean... kinda like the US does? How deep do you think our alliances that haven't even survived a century run?
This is the thing that annoys me, many Americans approve their government doing industrial espionage to other countries, but then are morally outraged when others do it.
We're not at war, and I assume it's perfectly legal to copy information about labs or whatever, so long as you don't incidentally violate any contracts or laws.
Ultimately, there is no real morality when it comes to the actions of state actors beyond "will it improve my citizen's life?". This most certainly will, so for a Chinese official it seems moral to them.
Many people do believe it is a moral wrong to impose something on other people without their consent.
You could also make an argument that the other people are withholding something that could be used to do good for their own interests they lose the moral high ground.
In any case, there is really no moral argument to indict them, it's purely a question of interests in this case, so let's not pretend.
Have you stolen intellectual property?
People are pretty open about "I'm planning to work at Google for a year so I can learn how they do things and then take that with me to my startup."